


Ghosti

by Hth



Category: due South
Genre: Alternate Timeline, Canada, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-14
Updated: 2009-12-14
Packaged: 2017-10-04 10:24:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hth/pseuds/Hth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He'd killed the part of himself that had been partnered to Fraser when he signed for that transfer after the Henry Adams.  One last case, boom, then done.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ghosti

**1.  "There. Done.  Pleasure working with you."**

"Okay, okay, have a seat.  I got fifteen minutes, they're all yours.  Shit. Um, just...here, just knock something off this chair, here."  Detective Ray Kowalski glanced up, meeting his visitor's eyes for the first time.  He shrugged asymmetrically and grinned around his toothpick, an easy smile, with a shake of self-mockery.  "Just toss this shit anywhere; that's what I do.  If I'd known this office came with the promotion, I probably would've turned it down."

Most people smiled when he cracked that joke, which Ray had been using for the entire year since he moved into this pine box of an office.  Hey, that was the secret of his appeal in a nutshell: Detective Kowalski was a regular guy, just a local boy, and half an overgrown teenager, too.  He didn't like the hassle of responsibility, the extra burdens of paperwork and cleaning the place up, preferred to hang here and talk to _you_, in his office that you can see perfectly well used to be a broom closet or something.  Tell him everything.

All mostly bullshit, of course.  But you catch more flies with honey, and since he could never have pulled off the old earth-angel routine -- which was the brand of honey he'd learned first, watching his old partner in action -- he made the flip side work for him.  Guy from the corner bar, unpretentious, no attitude to speak of.  People who'd known Kowalski for a while still remembered the old attitude, the temper, the high-strung coil of in-your-face, kick-'em-in-the-head energy he'd once been so proud of.

You could only pull that off if you had a partner, though -- good cop went with bad, like chocolate and caffeine.  Now that he was on his own, Kowalski had to be all things to all people, and the goofy jokes and the low-lying charm -- well, who knew he could wear them this well?  Sure made Stella's head spin when they ran into each other now.  She was looking at him in a way she hadn't since they were twenty-one, a thought that he couldn't quite shake, even though he didn't have the time or the stamina to think about it too hard right now.

Still, there were some people who were just bound and determined not to be charmed, and this guy in his office was definitely one of them.  If Kathleen hadn't warned him that there was another detective here to see him, Kowalski would've gambled his last breath on this guy being a Fed.  He was wearing a charcoal suit that looked way too pricey to come out of a city budget, and there was something about the way he carried himself -- graceless: not clumsy, but like a statue that moved.  Elegant, but totally without warmth.  No, jokes were not going to fly here.

When he smiled, it was razor-thin and pretty unpleasant.  "I'll stand," he said.

"Be my guest."  Kowalski, true to his word, pitched a couple of file folders onto the floor and took a seat on the edge of his desk.  This man had _bad news_ written all over his face, but Kowalski wasn't going to let it rattle him -- not yet.  Guys like this, they thought everything was the biggest disaster in the world since Marilyn died, but if there was one thing Kowalski was good at, it was prioritizing.  He'd soon see if this was bad news or just bad news.  "Great.  Now, sorry, who'd I hear you were?"

"_Ray.  Vecchio._"

"Ah," he said.  Huh.  You'd think he would have caught that the first time; he hadn't had any reason to think about that name for a while, but hearing it now, it...pinged.  It caught him like the scratch of a fingernail -- quick, minor, noticeable.  He'd _been_ that, once.  Responded to the name as though it were his.  You didn't shake that completely, not without a lot of water under the bridge.

Well, Christ on a crutch, he had a lot on his mind lately.  A few things had to get tabled, shunted to the bottom of the inbox, and one of those things was Detective Ray Vecchio of the 2-7.  Kowalski had a job of his own, now.  "Well...so you're home.  Good deal."

"No thanks to you."

"You got a problem with my work?"  It was sharper than he wanted, a little defensive, even though it shouldn't be; there was no _reason_ he should take any of the weight for the Vecchio case on his own shoulders now.  He'd worked that case more than a year ago; when he'd been offered a different job, Vecchio was alive and well, and anything since then was not on Ray Kowalski.  Really, he ought to tell Vecchio to scram out of his broom office; he did have a _schedule_ thing going on here.

"Yeah.  Yeah, I got a problem with your work.  _Where the hell is my Mountie?_"

Blast from the past.  Kowalski threw his shoulder to pull a quick knot of tension out of his neck.  But this was nothing -- this was just a...a debriefing, a little wrap-up on an old job, like when you went to court to testify on a routine bust you made a year ago.  Right, let's sing it like that.  "Gone to the land where all good Mounties go.  Canada."

"Canada."

"Canada.  Kinda northward from here.  Other side of the lake.  They raise Mounties, and Alanis Morissettes."

"Just. Shut. Up."  Normally Kowalski wouldn't take that, not in his own office, but...yeah, well.  Detective Vecchio didn't look too good there, pale and strung-out like a much older guy than Kowalski knew that he was.  The three smallest fingers of his right hand were in a brace, and there was something just a little off about the way he held himself, like it was more than just his style to go walking around like a statue.  Like he was being too careful with his own body.  Guy had obviously had it rough recently, and now he was missing Fraser.

Missing Fraser.

Missing Fraser.  Which Ray didn't know a damn thing about, because he had never missed Fraser, not for a second, not for the blink of an eye, not for any reason at all, not Fraser or his wolf or his five-dollar vocabulary words or his circus outfit or his anecdotes or his bullshit, I'm-too-important-to-bother-with-you uncommunicative _bullshit_ attitude.

But still.  It had to be rough, coming home, expecting Fraser, getting nothing.  That was why he didn't just show Vecchio the door -- not because Ray owed him anything, not because he had any doubts about the work he'd done undercover--

\--not because he secretly suspected that Fraser's name would feel good in his mouth, was fishing for some reason to say it one more time--

\--just because Ray Vecchio looked like a guy who was getting worse than he deserved.  And maybe that rated a few points, given that Ray had once _been_ Ray Vecchio.

He took a breath, which came out sounding like a huff.  "Look, I'm sorry I didn't stick with your, case, your thing.  I got this other offer, and let's face it, I was never an Oscar-nominated Ray Vecchio.  They got another guy; why don't you go catch up with him?"  Peter DeMello, from the 19th.  He probably wasn't supposed to know that, but...but, hell.  It seemed important at the time.  Even when you were getting rid of kittens, you _specified_, you said "to a good home," let alone when you were getting rid of a life that was practically yours for a little while there.

"Because he didn't know Benny."  The guy was obviously trying for pissed-off, but he mostly sounded lost.  "He said Benny was...was gone when he got to the 2-7.  Welsh said he left when you did.  What the hell happened to him?  What did you do?"

"It's gotta be my fault, huh?"  Huh, now this sounded familiar.  How come he was having the same fight with a guy he never laid eyes on before as he used to have with his own wife?  "Look, he got another fucking offer, just like I did.  He wanted to go back to Canada, you dig?  He didn't like it here, he was homesick, how the hell should I know?  You think he ever talked to _me_?"

Ouch.  That had teeth; that was bitter and it hurt to say, and from the way Vecchio's eyes narrowed, it wasn't any fun to hear, either.

He hadn't been angry, not for a long time.  Fraser...he was Fraser.  Him and Fraser, they just never _worked_, they didn't pan out.  They parted like friends, mostly like friends, and they went on to bigger and better things, and talking about it shouldn't turn around and bite like that.

"Just shut up, would you?  Let me think for a second!"  Vecchio ran his good hand roughly across the back of his neck.  "Shit.  _Shit_.  I can't believe I just got home, and now I gotta turn right around and go to Canada.  Canada!  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!"

"Canada?" Ray repeated blankly.  "What for?"

Slowly, still working around some kind of stiffness ( a hint of bandaging wrapped under his silk shirt?  Hard to tell for sure), Ray Vecchio leaned in, bracing one hand on Kowalski's desk.  He looked even less like Ray than the photographs Ray had been shown would indicate -- but on the other hand, he was not quite as, well, weird-looking as the pictures, either -- almost handsome, in an ordinary kind of way.  "_What for?_  Because he's my _friend_, you stupid little shit.  Because I didn't practically get myself killed in Las Vegas so that I could never see him again.  _You_ are not _me_, you get that?  Whatever your problem with him was, it's not my problem, and I'm not going to let it ruin the best partnership I ever had."  Vecchio pushed himself up straight again, and even though Ray could see the flash of pain in his eyes, Vecchio's glare kept right on like the Energizer Bunny.  "Sorry to take up so much of your _time_, Detective Kowalski."

He slammed the door on the way out.  After a moment of paralysis, Ray shook it off with a stretch and a little shadow-boxing -- all of it, good and bad, all the screwed-up and conflicting feelings that raised the hair on the back of his arms when those names closed around his brain and jabbed like pincers: Ray Vecchio.  Constable Fraser.

Things to do things to do, hey, one thing you couldn't argue with: he was not Ray Vecchio.  Not anymore.  And none of this had anything to do with him.  Not anymore.

He'd killed the part of himself that had been partnered to Fraser when he signed for that transfer after the Henry Adams.  One last case, boom, then done.

Finished forever.

Impatiently, Ray knocked over a stack of papers, digging for his day planner.  Never could keep track of that thing.

 

**2\. "Look, the problem is we're stale.  Like bread of something.  You know, maybe it's time for a change."**

It took Kowalski the rest of the night to turn his whole life inside out, to burn everything down to the ground.  One night to go crazy and then to hitchhike all the way back.

_Things got a lot better after Ray left the 2-7, on every front.  He got his name back.  He got a date.  He got a commendation, and a new apartment, and he even got his wife back -- as a friend, but as it turned out, that was enough to make both of them happy again.  Christ, he was happy.  His parents even turned out of the clear blue sky, like a deus ex Winnebago, and suddenly Ray had a family again.  He'd made a change, turned his life around, and reaped the rewards.  He was in a good place, and he would've been a fool to question it.  Even when the new and shiny wore off, and it was just regular life, with its own whole set of annoyances and regrets, Ray figured...why question it?  It was a pretty good life, and you couldn't just go changing everything every time you had a day that wasn't sweeter than candy.  Sometimes the dealer offered you another card, and you just...shouldn't take it._

At seven-fifteen, Ray barely managed to beat the sandwich delivery guy to his apartment; traffic had faked him out, looking perfectly doable when he called the order in on his cell phone, and then suddenly folding up like a bear trap right around him while he sweated and fumed and wondered how much it was going to cost him to get yet another delivery place to cross his name off their hate list.  When he did get the sandwich, it didn't even have the right kind of mayo on it , and the turtle wouldn't touch his normal share of the lettuce.

No skin off Ray's nose.  Turtle didn't want to eat, turtle could go hungry.  Crappy pet anyway.  Grown-ups didn't have turtles.  They had dogs, or maybe fish if they were too important for long frisbee trips to the park.  They didn't have cats or hamsters or turtles.  Well, grown-up women had cats, maybe.  But turtles, turtles were strictly circa fifth grade.

At five after eight, he took the turtle out of its tank and let it walk around on the kitchen counter, which it did for a couple of minutes, and then it got tired and lay down, retracting its head from sight.  Ray sighed and let his fingers run over the whorled grooves of its shell.

He remembered picking this turtle out of the tank at the pet store -- the only one who wouldn't put its head out when Ray tempted it with collard greens.  He figured it was probably dead, but the pet store guy said no, just freaked out.  Don't you ever just want to pull something over your head and to hell with it? he asked, possibly rhetorically, with a laugh in his voice.  It made Ray think of that morning, hitting the snooze button six separate times, hating the too-small bed that came with his furnished apartment, but hating the idea of waking up even worse, and the smell of the pillow he grabbed and held over his own head, the all-wrong smell that was just the smell of department stores and hair-gel residue.  That's the one I want, he said to the pet store guy.  The freaked-out one.  He was still wearing his wedding ring that afternoon, even though he hadn't been married for almost three months.

It was the only thing in the world Ray figured he could get along with now, the only person he could live with.  A reptile with neuroses.  A freak.  Like Stella said, romance was one thing, but after you get to a certain age, you want to be in a relationship where you understand each other.

She was right about that.  Shit, she was right about most everything.  It was why he loved her -- not the beauty, not the money, not the sense of soft, white-light innocence that still hung like a mist around the efficient lawyer just like it had around the little girl in pearl earrings and chipped pink fingernail polish.  The mind.  The things she remembered, the connections she drew, the way she talked about things that Ray just saw as events and made them into messages and meanings with nothing more than her lovely words and the force of her confidence.

So he'd never understood it.  He'd thought it was truer than beauty and finer than success; he'd thought she was lit with it, like candles inside red glass on the table at the classy restaurants they used to go to that were more fun when they were poor than later on when they could afford it.  For a while it had been enough, and then eventually...eventually Ray guessed she wanted someone who would nod wisely and say _I know what you mean_ when she was being right about things, instead of _I ever tell you I get turned on when you use words like "vernacular?"_

Ray liked smart chicks.  The smarter the finer.  Smart chicks with sharp tongues and innocent eyes who sassed him back when he pushed and pushed, arguing just to watch himself lose, subsiding into stubborn silence that looked like sulking but was really something more like reverence.

That was what turned Ray's key, what gave him what he needed to keep going: the back-and-forth, the dance, the fight.  He could play at milk and honey, he could be the good guy, hell, he could even be an earth angel if he had to be, but it wasn't worth shit if there was nobody there to get under his skin, to play dirty, to fake him out and shake him down and treat him bad and want him back.

At eight-forty, he called her.  "Did you hear that Ray Vecchio was back at the 2-7?" he asked.

"No. I didn't know that."  A year ago, she would have followed it with _Ray, I'm a little busy right now_, in that tone that really said, _I know my rights, and I can have a restraining order within the hour_.  Now there was no follow-up at all, just a soft silence rippling up and down the phone line that was neither awkward nor comfortable, just _silent_.

"Do you remember Charlotte Chynoweth?"

"From college?  Yes, but what does she have to do with Ray Vecchio?  Isn't she still in San Antonio?"

"Yeah -- no, I mean, I have no idea where she is."

"San Antonio.  I think I have her Christmas letter around here somewhere...."

"Forget it, forget it, San Antonio's not the point.  The point -- do you remember the Memorial Day party, Jack Weatherly--"

"Weatherell."

"Not the point!  Jack's place on the lake, you remember that party?  You kissed Charlotte Chynoweth?"

"Of course I remember," she said, in her _this is my very patient voice_ voice.  "Ray that was practically two decades ago.  It was another world.  What's going on with you?"

And if only he knew....  "I was just wondering....  Did anything...change?  After that?"

"With you and me?"

"With -- anything, with anything.  Did anything change?"

"No, not that I remember.  I don't know, Ray, it was a long time ago.  Are you all right?"

"I'm all right," he said.

They talked for a few more minutes, not about anything, really.  Stella left two different openings, all cued up and ready to go for maybe a dinner invitation or something, but the words weren't there at the key moment, and so Ray let his chances go.  But he ended the conversation by saying, "Stel, I gotta go.  I love you, though."

She was silent for a moment before saying, "Ray, you're worrying me.  Really -- is everything--?"

"It's golden, it's golden, I swear to you.  I'm okay.  I'll talk to you again."

At nine-twenty, he left a message for his lieutenant, babbled something retarded about his family and flexibly vague references to an emergency, and hung up on himself, right in the middle of it, right on the ragged edge of asking permission to smash his life into tiny pieces, like a toy boat on Six Fucking Fathom Shoal.  He smashed an old wine glass instead, last survivor of what started out as a set of six, or maybe even eight, slammed it onto the kitchen counter and watched it shatter.  Swept up the remains and fed them down the disposal, then soaked invisible pricklings of glass out of the callused skin along the heel of his hand.

That was the high point of crazy, at about nine-twenty p.m.  Crazy Lookout Mountain.  Crazy Lovers' Leap?  The K2 of Crazy.  The pain cleared his mind just enough to let Ray think, check it out -- crazy.  I'm crazy....

So much for Joe Mellow, for that almost-perfect dance, honey and flies, grace and charm and all the other shit that he'd had down for a little while there.  Now he was breaking things again, hating things, caught up in how things _should_ have been, how he'd _wanted_ them to be, _counted_ on them being, and how they just weren't.  Wine glasses that Stella bought, all broken now, each with a funny or romantic or fucked-up story about how they got broken, but the point was, gone anyway.  Touching his own hand the way Stella used to, thumb smoothing over palm, taking care, being with.

_He wasn't happy.  He'd been fucking _ crazy_ to think that he'd ever come back from that long fall into the water, because the truth was, he was still drowning down there, down where Benton Fraser had led him and left him.  Water in his lungs, wildness in his heart, blood dribbling slowly down his palms and wrists.  No, this wasn't how the song went, this wasn't where he'd meant to take his life, and no, he wasn't happy.  He was rotting, and crazy, and bleeding at the bottom of a year-long lake._

Glass embedded under skin, all those remains of sharp things that stuck invisibly just inside the surface of Ray's life.  Fraser had shown him how to soak the afflicted areas -- _afflicted areas_ \-- he could hear Fraser's voice saying it, God, he could hear the _voice_ \-- in warm water, soothing the pain and rinsing out those pieces of window or windshield or whatever they'd gone barrelling through together.  Weird that something that felt good could actually make it better; usually it was even money that if you'd gotten your ass into something bad, you were gonna have to hurt yourself worse to get it out again.  But Fraser always knew the little tricks, the secret times and ways when what you wanted was what you needed, too. Water beats glass.  Air beats water.

Water.  Going crazy felt a lot like drowning, and Ray Kowalski never learned how to swim.  Not for real.

Water and air.  Air and water.

Air air air air breath--_breathe, breathe, breathe, you stupid freak, nothing's changed, nothing can ever change, and change never did you any goddamn favors anyway, did it?_\--

Breathe....

At five minutes to eleven, he was standing on the front porch of a house he hadn't seen in more than a year.  "Tell him I'm coming, too," he said, before hi, hello, how are you, before anything, jumping the words through the door so they couldn't be shut out again.  "Tell him I want to go."

He wasn't crazy anymore, by eleven o'clock.

"Tell him yourself," Frannie suggested, simply, no smart comments to make, for once.  She held the door open wider and stepped aside, and there was nothing but the words and their meaning between Ray and the other Ray, the one whose unbuttoned shirt showed red burn welts on his chest and bruise-black marks over his ribs that looked like fists but bigger and harder -- like brass knuckles.

"Canada," he said, wondering if he looked on the inside, now that he was rid of Fraser, like Vecchio did on the outside because of trying to get back to him.  _Don't say no, you don't understand, I have to, I have to fix it, I thought I was living with it but I've been smothering under it, and this has to change._

Ray Vecchio held out the glass of wine in his hand, almost full, and Ray walked through the door and took his drink, wondering what this stranger saw on his face that made his mouth quirk up like that.

 

**3\. "Tell me where my partner is."**

"You must be the Americans."  The Mountie sounded delighted to meet them, but Ray had his suspicions.  There was something screwy about the way Canadian guys looked at you, like they weren't going to kick you out of their country, they just wished they knew what the hell you had to come here for in the first place.  "I'm Constable Shaughnessy, and welcome to Rankin Inlet, gateway to Kivalliq!"

"Yeah, thanks," Vecchio said, in that voice that could shut up even a happy Mountie.  "So you got the message?"

"Oh, yes, yes indeed.  Please, sit down, Detectives."  Ray did sit down, gingerly, making sure his ass was still there before he put any weight on it.  Windy City, _hell_, the wind up here had to be a hundred miles an hour, and with nothing as far as the eye could see to break it, not a hill or a tree or even a very tall person.  Fraser must look like a pro wrestler among these compact, stocky Eskimos -- Inuit.  Whatever.  Ray was numb _everywhere_.  His eyebrows felt totally flayed off, and he wondered if that was how Fraser picked up that thing with rubbing his eyebrows.  Checking for damage.

Vecchio stayed standing.  Man, the guy was a hardass; they'd been traveling together for almost three days, and while he'd been treated to plenty of Ray Vecchio's sense of humor (which had a lot in common with the wind in Rankin Inlet), it was like hanging out with a meat-eating turtle.  Fucking reptile, cold-blooded, dark eyes with no expression, dragging his own shell along with him wherever he went.  This was Fraser's best friend?  This was the guy Fraser _didn't_ want to get away from?

"I'm afraid you're a few days late -- or perhaps I should say a few days early?"  Shaughnessy laughed at his own joke, if joke was the right word, putting his hands on his rounded belly like a picture of Santa Claus as he did it.  A young, brown, beardless Santa Claus, up here not too damn far from the North Pole.  "Constable Fraser is visiting Whale Cove this week."

"Whale Cove," Ray repeated, downtrodden.  Great.  They'd told him at the Consulate that he'd find Fraser in Winnipeg, and Winnipeg said he'd signed with them but never gotten there, try Yellowknife, and Yellowknife said, yeah, he was here, but he's gone now, and sent them both on to Rankin Inlet, and now he wasn't in Rankin Inlet, either, he was in Whale freaking Cove, which was undoubtedly another place there were no roads to, just some rickety little plane run by some company called something like Calm Air -- a name that made Ray want to go up to the cockpit and say, _goddamn Canadians, why does it have to be _calm_, why does everything have to be so fucking _calm_ all the time?  What's the matter with you?_

"Whale Cove is one of the more traditional local communities," the constable told them, as though _Whale Cove_ had been a question, like, _Whale Cove?_ \-- instead of just kind of a comment, like, _right, Whale Cove_.  "They hardly require an RCMP detachment of their own, especially since the town itself is often quite--"

"We'll wait," Vecchio said.  It sounded like a threat.

"Of course you will," Shaughnessy said, only he didn't say it in a snotty, American way.  "You'll stay with my wife and me."

All three of them walked to Shaughnessy's house, and Ray stepped twice on Vecchio's heels, totally by accident.  "Would you watch where you're going, you retard?" Vecchio said and Ray mumbled an apology.  He really couldn't watch where he was going, because he was fascinated by the sight of the cloudless sky, going to a pre-twilight color, gunmetal blue, even though it was the middle of the afternoon.  It was so...big.  Vast.  Ray figured that Fraser probably called it _vast_.  Back home, the sky was just where all the air went, but in Canada Ray couldn't help but feel like it was a real thing, a long slab that was resting comfortably on top of them.

He couldn't say anything like that, of course -- definitely not to Vecchio.  But no matter how hard he tried to watch where he was going, Ray's eyes kept being drawn up to the sky.  He wondered if that was how Fraser got to be the way he was -- growing up with that hanging over you wherever you went, seeing everything you ever did.

"That's a peregrine falcon," Constable Shaughnessy said, and Ray grunted in a way that he hoped sounded interested; bird-watching was a lot more normal than staring around the birds because you couldn't look away from the sky.  "'Peregrine' is derived from the Latin for 'through the land,' and it means foreign, or wandering.  A traveler.  Like the two of you."

The Mountie seemed pleased by his powers of association, but all Ray could do was wonder which one he was, wandering or traveling.  Because it wasn't exactly the same thing, was it?

Normally, Ray would have offered to arm-wrestle or something for the bed in the guest room, but it was obvious from the way Ray Vecchio moved that he was still in a world of hurt, so Ray gave it up with mediocre grace and settled in to sleep in the armchair by the window.

"How'd you get those?" he asked as Vecchio applied some kind of cream to the short row of bruises that striped his stomach and sides at weird angles.  They were round in shape, dark near the center and fading along the outer ring to woodsy hazel and green shades.  They were in sets of four, like knuckles, but too large and too, well, just _bad_.  Definitely brass knuckles.

"How do you think, _Detective_?  My cover went pffft."

"You don't like me very much, do you?"

Vecchio raised his eyebrows, but he didn't jump into that one, either to deny it or to smack Ray down for it.  "I can't figure you out," he finally said.  "I don't know why you wanted to come here."

Welcome to the club.  "I just always wanted to see the North Pole."

"The North Pole is in the Arctic Circle, genius.  This is Canada."

"The magnetic north pole is in Nunavut," Ray said coolly, and Vecchio's head snapped around in surprise.  "Hey, it was in that brochure they gave us on the plane.  Those of us who weren't zonked out on sleeping pills had to do something to pass the time."

"More power to you.  Me, I'm working on my drug habit.  If I'm lucky, I'll be an addict by the time Frannie's wedding rolls around, and they'll want to keep me as far out of sight as possible.  Take it from me, Kowalski, the last thing you want to be in an Italian wedding is involved.  I didn't even want to be involved when I was the one getting married."

If Ray could have backed physically away from that idea, he would have.  "Frannie's getting married?"  It didn't seem right -- it didn't seem _fair_.  Fraser hadn't been gone _that_ long; what happened to being in love with him?

"Yeah, to your replacement.  Peter... Peter...."

"DeMello."

"Yeah, you know him?"

Ray shrugged, and then realized what he'd almost admitted to.  "Oh -- oh, yeah.  Hell of a  guy.  Recommended him myself for the job."

"That laugh _kills_ me.  He sounds like a fucking air-raid siren.  Looks like -- like a koala bear.  I thought I _was_ on drugs when they told me.  Frannie never used to be much  about the inner beauty, if you know what I mean.  But he thinks she, I don't know, floated down from some heavenly cloud to grace this poor earth."

"Of course he does.  If we weren't off in Never-Never La-La Land like that, why the hell would we ever want to get married?"

That made Vecchio laugh.  "We do it because we're delusional?  You're the last of the true romantics,  Kowalski."

"Yeah, because you know so much about me.  When the hell did she get over Fraser, anyway?"  It had only been a year.  Didn't anyone have any -- any _stamina_ anymore?  Any fucking loyalty?  A broken heart was supposed to last a little longer than a really bad hangover, wasn't it?

Vecchio gave him a long, keen look before saying, "You get over people when you decide you're going to."

"It's not like putting the cat out before you go to bed, Vecchio.  You don't just...just _do_ it."

"I'm just saying that you pick a certain person out of all those fish in the sea because of certain reasons.  And if those reasons change -- like the person isn't around or goes away or you can't get along with them anymore or whatever -- then suddenly you've got the wrong fish on your hands."

"Are you going to turn out the light or what?"

That night, Ray dreamed about the boat -- not the sinking one (he'd had that nightmare for a while after the fact, but not for six months or more), but the wooden one.  He dreamed of being back at the rail, looking down at the churning lake water, with white flashes of light sparkling along the surface and dark flashes sparkling underneath, the almost invisible play of the fish.  "Look, Ray," Fraser said to him.  "A sign."

"What, the fish?  'S just a fish."

His voice seemed cracked and vague, like a  radio station that wouldn't quite come in.  "It's a sign -- water quality -- Great Lakes -- you never see -- explain everything to you -- environmental -- missing the signs...."

"So, are you gonna take that transfer?"  That wasn't just the dream; Ray remembered saying that in real life, just like that.  Giving him the chance, the choice, just like he hadn't done for Stella.  He'd forced her into escaping him, and that was wrong.  That was wrong.

But in  Ray's dream, instead of _I'm afraid that it's out of my hands now, Ray_, Fraser didn't say anything at all.  He just climbed up on the rail of the ship and jumped off, boots first, in full Mountie regalia and his hat still on his head.

And in the dream, unlike real life, Ray didn't find himself completely without words.  In fact, he was yelling, leaning over the rail and yelling into the wind-sliced water, "Fraser!  No, it's not!  It's not out of your hands, Fraser, it's not out of your fucking hands!"  He couldn't see Fraser underwater, though -- just a dark flash that could as easily have been more fish, or maybe one of those giant sea turtles.

Vecchio shook him awake.  "Christ, you trying to wake up the whole town?"

"Sorry," Ray mumbled.  "Was I-- did I say something?

"I dunno.  Something about Fraser being out of hand.  Don't make me gag you, okay, Kowalski?"

"You got any more of those sleeping pills?"

Vecchio did.

 

**4\. "Wow, that Canadian charm is working overtime today, Fraser."**

He probably could have woken up the whole town of Rankin Inlet if he'd really been trying; according to the Shaughnessys, the place was population two thousand.  Two thousand.  Ray and Fraser had canvassed _apartment_ buildings with that many people back home.

And it wasn't a cozy, old-world-charm little burg, either; Rankin Inlet looked a lot like any working-class midwestern town that Ray had ever driven past, where Wal-Mart and the truck stop were the closest things to tourist attractions and the teenagers developed drinking problems because there was nothing else to do on weekends -- except that there were snowmobiles up on blocks in people's front yards instead of pickup trucks.  Even the land was dead-looking, all rocks and dirt with the texture of sand.

But the sky.  The sky was -- well, it was just fucking amazing.  Huge, huger than huge, and it looked like this part of Canada didn't even believe in clouds.

Ray wasn't just crackerjack with directions (he thought it came from living in one place all his life; he could get anywhere in Chicago that he wanted to go without thinking about which way was which, and actually usually he probably shouldn't think about it), but you didn't have to be one of those migrating super-birds who flew from Virginia to Buenos Aires or whatever to get around in Rankin Inlet.  There wasn't any _lost_ to get.

The pilot from their little one-engine toy Calm Air plane said there was only one road out of Rankin Inlet, but there were roads inside the town itself, all of which seemed to converge on one block, with a post office, a bank, and a store called Northern that seemed to be Canada's answer to Wal-Mart.  Four-wheeled ATVs, like motorcycles on steroids more than cars, were parked along the streets, and there were more than a dozen people hanging around -- just hanging around their little oasis of civilization like people in Chicago hung around city parks, their little oases of nature.  They all looked at Ray as he walked past, and nobody said hello, which Ray liked.  Ha, ha, Fraser, see?  Nobody likes a freak from out of town, not even in Canda.

There was even an ATM; Mrs. Constable Shaughnessy said there was one at the bank, but Ray had been scared to believe it.  How the hell could you have a  town with an ATM but no _roads_?  But it was there, large as life, dropping Canadian bills into his hand as the screen told him to Have A Nice Day in English, French, and a language that appeared to be composed entirely of Ks and Qs.

He ducked into the Northern next door and spent most of what he'd withdrawn on warmer boots and socks, and the leftovers on candy and a bottle of Pepsi.  The girl at the register was probably nineteen or twenty, and she kept poking the tip of her tongue into the gap between her front teeth, which was a little bit cute.  Ray wondered what the kids did for fun in Rankin Inlet -- got drunk?  Surely not; it wasn't like in a place this size everybody from your parents to the RCMP wouldn't know exactly where you were at all times, and if nothing else, Fraser would probably mentor the holy hell out of anyone who tried to flout the Queen's legal drinking age on his watch.

Only when he came out of the Northern, facing the direction he'd originally come from, did Ray finally notice the _thing_ sitting up on the top end of the town.  It was a stack of stones on a hill, roughly shaped but so tall and so -- just -- _weird_, that it had to be man-made.  It almost looked like a man, even.  Like a rock snowman, maybe ten feet tall, looking down over Rankin Inlet without so much as button eyes and a corncob pipe.  Just a plain, gray face, scored unevenly by wind and cold.

All Ray could do was stand and stare at it.  _What_ in the hell was that thing for, anyway? And could you go anyplace in Canada where something wasn't watching you to make sure you didn't spit on the sidewalk or something?  No wonder Fraser was so goddamn neurotic.

The Shaughnessys took Kowalski and Vecchio out to dinner that night, to a place inside the local hotel that Ray figured was Canada's answer to the truck stop.  Vecchio ordered lasagna and assured the waitress it tasted practically just like his mother's -- well, his sister's, at least.  Ray had a fish the size of a Ford Explorer.  It was an okay evening, but the worst part was walking back to the Shaughnessys', toward that rock troll.  The clear sky made the starlight potent, and out of the edge of his downturned vision, Ray could see soft, pale lights that he guessed was the Aurora Borealis, and it should've been pretty, but really it was just enough light to make the rock troll into a giant black silhouette that looked like it had just moved a little bit while Ray wasn't watching.

"Look!" the Constable said, pointing to a building that Ray recognized after a second as the station house.  There was a light on inside.  "If that's him, he's made good time.  Shall we go and see?"  He didn't look both ways before trotting out across the road, but then Ray guessed a drunk Eskimo on a snowmobile wasn't going to come peeling around the corner in the next three seconds.  Vecchio and Mrs. Shaughnessy followed, and Ray trailed along after them.

He was standing behind ground zero when the door opened, and he couldn't see anything from the back of the theater over here, but he could hear Diefenbaker start barking, and Fraser's voice from inside, saying, "--sir, I don't know what's gotten into him--" and then there was the big dust-up, a barrage of barking and the Shaughnessys laughing in vicarious delight, and Vecchio's belligerent "You ever hear of a fucking forwarding address, Benny?" and Fraser's voice -- Fraser's voice  -- saying, "Ray, _Ray_, why -- _Ray_."

"Now, now, Constable, don't look that way at me!" Constable Shaughnessy was protesting, with his hands up like he was surrendering to a guy with a gun.  "I didn't know a thing until they appeared in my office yester--"

"They?" Fraser repeated.

"Me."  Ray finally got his feet to move, and he stepped up to the plate.  "I'm here, too.  Hey, Fraser."

"Hello, Ray.  It's...good to see you."  He sounded like he was trying the words out to see whether or not they sounded true, and he looked like he was testing out the ground with each step as he walked to where Ray was standing.  Fraser wasn't wearing a coat, just his brown uniform, but aside from red-stained cheeks and nose, the cold didn't seem to affect him much.  He didn't have to squint like Ray did every time the wind cut along his face; Fraser's eyes were just like they always had been, wide-open and blue-steady.

"Well, settle down before you bust something.  Jesus, it's fucking freezing out here; can we take this party inside?"

"Actually, it's well above the average temperature for early September above the 80th parallel.  The precipitation this year has also been--"

"Oh, for Christ's sake, Fraser.  Shut up.  I say it's cold; you can't even just agree with me that it's cold?  It's the frigging tundra, I say it's cold, you have to _argue_?"

"Then God be blessed," Fraser said soberly, "it is the blessed sun.  But sun it is not, when you say it is not, and the moon changes even as your mind."

"Fraser, I swear on my mother's grave, which she is not yet in, that if that was Shakespeare I'm gonna pop you one."

"Ah," Fraser said, rolling the syllable out slowly like a red carpet.  His eyes seemed to be mapping Ray out, memorizing his averages and statistics and details, and Jesus, but Ray had forgotten what a crazy color those eyes were.  Sky blue, Great Lakes blue, water-air water-air eyes.  "I _have_ missed you, Ray.  I really think I have."

There didn't seem to be anything to say to that -- except _I missed you, too_, Ray guessed, and he didn't think the guy who made the trip all the way up over the 80th parallel should have to come right out and _say_ that -- so he didn't say anything at all.  Even when the five of them closed and locked up the RCMP station and walked back to the Shaughnessys' for a pot of blackberry tea, Ray mostly let the others talk, because....

Well, yeah.  Because anything he and Fraser said to each other was bound to be just a cover for the real question between them, which was _Why are you here?_ and which Ray did not have the answer to.  The one exception was when Vecchio asked why Fraser and Diefenbaker were bickering with each other this time, and Fraser said that Dief wanted to enter next year's 200 and Fraser wasn't having it.

"200?" Ray asked.

"It's a dogsled race," Mrs. Shaughnessy explained for the benefit of the stupid Americans.  "The Nunavut 200.  Runs from Rankin Inlet to Arviat in the spring, two hundred miles in five days."

"We ran it last year, and you would think he'd had enough humiliation.  But apparently you would be mistaken."  Fraser glared at his wolf, who whined.  "_Close?_  We came in twelfth.  How is that close?  Closer than thirteenth, I grant you, but other than--"

"Why don't you just let him run, Fraser?" Ray found himself saying, not in an argumentative way, just curious.  "Is that the worst thing in the world, losing a frigging race?"

Fraser looked a little embarrassed, and he studied his tea.  "It seems...well, it seems that there ought to be more productive uses of our time than--"

"Oh, bullshit, Fraser, listen to yourself.  Are you so stuck-up that you won't let the dog so much as go out and play in the snow if it doesn't make you look good?"

"You've never suffered a lack of competitive spirit yourself, unless I misremember," Fraser said shortly.

Ray laughed, but he didn't feel funny at all.  "Believe me, Fraser, buddy, I've lost plenty.  You should try it more often; I think it'd look good on ya."

"I prefer to perform to the best of my abilities -- even understanding, as I do, that more people envy those who achieve excellence than admire them."

"More tea?" Mrs. Shaughnessy said quickly, and that was the end of Ray's participation in happy-family small talk.

Fraser didn't live in Rankin Inlet, as it turned out; he'd built a cabin three miles north of town, where he said both Rays were more than welcome to stay as long as they needed to.  Ray thought that was an interesting way to say it: as long as they needed to.  Were they here because they _needed_ to be, in the first place?  And if so, when would they not need to be here anymore?

"I need to talk to you," Vecchio said to Fraser, his voice low and rushed, as Mrs. Shaughnessy fussed around putting sheets and pillows on the couch for Fraser, since the global consensus was that it was much too late for Fraser to expect everyone to fall out and make the hike up to his place.

"Tomorrow, Ray," Fraser promised.  "Sleep first."

Vecchio had worked his way up the stairs, Fraser staring after him with worry swimming in his eyes.  "He's hurt rather badly, isn't he?"

"Who, Vecchio?"  _No, Bob Dole.  Idiot._  "Yeah, I guess he took a couple good hits.  He's fine, though.  Shit, for all I know, he's faking to get our HMO to pay for his Valium."

"That's not a kind thing to suggest, Ray.  Is there some sort of friction between the two of you?"

"Me and Vecchio?  Nah.  He's a true American hero; I'm the president of his frigging fan club.  It's all good."

"Why are you here, Ray?"

You could dodge and weave all you liked, but when your number was up, it was up.  Still, Ray tried one last, sad stall.  "Don't you want to do this tomorrow, too?"

"No.  I'd like to do this tonight."

"What's with the stone troll?  What's that for?" Ray asked, because it sprang into his mind, and because it was a type of stall, too.

Fraser raised one eyebrow, and then smiled faintly.  "You're not making sense, Ray.  And you're avoiding my question."

"Maybe the second, yeah, but it's a perfectly legit question.  You know that pile of rocks out there, the rock snowman?  What _is_ that thing?"

"Ah.  You would be referring to the inuksuk, I believe.  In the old days, when the Inuit tribes followed the migrations of the caribou herds, they built inuksuks as landmarks.  This geographical area is known as the Canadian Shield; it is, in essence, a large plate of granite, and in addition to being inhospitable to most forms of large plant life, such as trees and staple crops, it provides relatively few naturally occurring distinctive features.  The Inuit had to build their own landmarks, or become hopelessly lost."

"So you steer toward the troll to find...the caribou?"

"Well, more likely to find a campsite.  But yes, that's the general idea.  Why are you here?"

"I want you to admit that you kissed me."  Ray didn't know until he said it that he was even thinking about exactly that, in exactly that way.  But it sounded right when he said it.  That sounded like definitely something that he wanted.

Fraser's crazy-blue eyes widened.  "You -- I -- _Ray_.  We've been through this; I shouldn't have to--  If you are referring to the manner in which I saved your life--"

"Well, if there's anything else I could be referring _to which_, then I guess I must've blocked it out.  You damn well know which I'm referring to.  Yeah, yeah, you saved my life.  Thank you, congratulations, good on ya.  Why can't you just fucking admit that you kissed me, too?"

"Are you seriously -- _seriously_ telling me that you followed me all the way to Nunavut after more than a year in order to hear me say that you were right and I was wrong?"

"Sure. Why not?"  It was as good as any other answer that Ray had.  It was a first draft, anyway.

"That's so _like_ you, Ray.  That's just utterly...characteristic."

"You know me and my characteristics."  He was in an oddly positive mood now that the question was asked and answered.  Accuracy was beside the point.  "G'night, Fraser."

 

**5\. "Well, it's logic of a kind."**

"Fraser built a cabin" did not, of course, mean that Fraser went out and hired a contractor.  He built it himself; Ray could tell just by looking at it, by how small and precise and perfect it was, perched on the edge of a small lake just like a little brown animal stopping to get a drink.

Vecchio got to have his talk; Ray went out walking around the lake to give them a little privacy inside.  The only lakes Ray had ever been near before were the Greats, but he figured this was more your standard kind of lake, the round, smooth kind that you could see all the way across and walk all the way around.  There was a white, fragile-looking layer of ice over the surface, almost more like a heavy frost, and once Ray did see a little brown animal wandering by -- a wolverine, maybe.

"I suppose we should talk, too," Fraser said when he came out later to collect Ray.  Ray didn't feel like peeling off his gloves to check his watch, so he didn't know how long he'd been circling out here; once he'd stared up toward the sun, trying to tell time that way, until he finally accepted that he didn't understand how that worked anyway, and gave up.

"You and Vecchio get everything worked out?"

"It wasn't so much a matter of working things out.  We just never had any closure.  He wanted his chance to say goodbye."

"Are there fish in that lake?"

"Yes, of course, Ray.  If the ice weren't too thin to stand on and too thick to take a boat onto, I would take you fishing.  If you'd been here a month ago, you would have been able to swim in it."

"That's a shocker, since I can't swim."

"I meant the -- I meant it's warm enough to swim.  In August.  Some days."

"So he said goodbye."

Fraser put his hands into the pockets of his coat, staring up toward the sky.  Ray wondered if he was noticing the sheer size of it, too, or if the thoughts in his head were the biggest thing he could focus on.  "I suppose we both did."

"So he's going back?"

"I suppose he is."

"Frannie's getting married."

Fraser smiled slightly.  "I heard, and I think it's lovely.  I'll send a gift back with Ray."

"Everybody's _over_ you, you know," Ray said, suddenly angry at all of them -- Fraser, Frannie, and all three once and future Ray Vecchios.  "You think that's _lovely_?"

"I think it's natural."

"Plenty of fish in the sea, huh?"  God, he'd never wanted to shoot a fellow officer so bad as he did the guy who'd said that to him after he'd come back from the last visit to the lawyers, the ink of his divorce still on his fingers.

"Time is the great healer."

"A rolling stone gathers no moss."

"What?"

"Sorry, I thought we were just trading cliches."

Fraser laughed at that, and his hand grazed Ray's shoulder briefly; he could see it, but he couldn't feel the touch through the heavy layers of his parka.  "You have a truly unique mind, Ray.  I've missed our conversations."

_Well, then why the fuck did you leave?_ Ray wanted to say, but didn't.  "I know what you mean," he said instead.  "I don't think I've had a really good argument since you left."

"Well, that's...endearing, in its way.  Will you be leaving with Ray?"

"What, just because I came with him?  Sorry, Fraser, buddy; I don't heel that well.  I can find my own way back to Chicago when I'm ready to go."

"I never meant to imply that you couldn't.  I just wondered how long--"

"I don't know, okay?  For as long as I need to, I guess.  Listen, you'll be the first to know when I decide to leave."

The three of them made a tight fit in Fraser's cabin, but they had an okay night of it.  Ray killed Vecchio at chess, while Fraser sewed something out of a skin he'd taken off the frame outside the house where it had been stretching.  He couldn't pronounce whatever it was that Fraser served them for dinner, but it was a meat stew of some kind, and Ray figured that was as much as he really wanted to know.  It was pretty good.  They were up till all hours, as Vecchio and Fraser got deep into an informal storytelling contest, ostensibly to decide who was more eccentric, mountain men or made men.  Vecchio got the bed -- and Diefenbaker -- and Ray slept in a chair, just like the two nights before, while Fraser spread out his bedroll on the floor.

By the next night, though, Vecchio was winging his way south again and Ray had inherited the bed, which was good, because all those chairs were getting to be murder on his neck.  It was long past dark when Fraser and Ray made it back from taking Vecchio to the Rankin Inlet airstrip, and Fraser used a battery-powered lantern to provide enough light to build a fire, which took him all of thirty seconds.  "So, is this one of those places where you never see the sun in winter?  I mean, how far north are we, exactly?"

"By the Christmas season, we'll have twenty-one-hour nights, and the daylight will go more or less directly from sunrise to sunset."

Ray found his mouth dry as he knelt in front of the fire to warm his hands.  Twenty-one-hour nights, Jesus.  It was practically not even human.  "Well, at least there's not much scenery to miss."

"You don't think so?"  Fraser sounded disappointed in him.  "Well, there's no accounting for taste, I suppose."

Ray instantly felt guilty and tasteless.  "I just think the place could use some color, that's all.  Other than brown and white.  A nice green or red."

"In the summer, the ground is covered with purple fireweed."

"My luck, I come when all the flowers are dead."

"There's always the Aurora Borealis.  You can't complain about colour there."

"I didn't really get a good look."

Fraser regarded him with something like horror for a minute, then stood.  "Put your coat on, Ray."

"Aw, c'mon, Fraser.  I'm just starting to get warm."

"This alone will make your trip worthwhile, I promise."

He rolled his eyes, but of course he put all his layers back on and followed Fraser out into the night.

At first glance they were pretty, full of just the kind of colors that Ray had been thinking of, from soft gold to even softer green, salmon pink and bloodstain red and ten shades of purple.  Ray could see why people would come north to check this out.

At second glance, the art lover in Ray took over, and he began to see paintings in the light -- Impressionist paintings, both famous ones that Ray had been partial to all his life, and a few of the non-existent ones that he'd been carrying around in his head for years knowing that he had neither the time nor the talent to get down on canvas.  Even the way they moved, windblown and smooth, was just like the way he always knew that a Renoir would move if it could move.

At third glance, it seemed as though the colors were endless, a thousand times the size of the small lake, small house, small men on the ground, and no matter how tightly Ray pulled his coat around his body, he was shivering.  "What's that sound?"

"What sound, Ray?"

"It's like a--a crackle sound.  Like a whispery sound."  It reminded him of the faint rustle of fabric, when Stella had to go to a formal party for work and she wore a long skirt that took on a life of its own as she moved.  "It's the light," he finally realized, amazed all over again.  "Jesus hopping Christ.  I can hear it.  I never heard light before."

"You can't hear it, Ray."

"Fraser, I'm _hearing_ it.  I'm standing here and listening to this sound, this crackling sound.  How are you gonna tell me I can't hear it _while_ I'm hearing it?"

"The Aurora Borealis is caused by solar flares, which jet out a wave of particles called solar winds.  They travel toward the earth, drawn toward the magnetic north and south poles, and what you see are those particles interacting with various gases in the upper atmosphere.  By 'upper atmosphere,' I mean roughly a hundred kilometres above the surface of the earth.  If there is an associated sound, you most certainly cannot hear it from where you're standing."

"Fraser.  You're spoiling it."

Fraser frowned, and opened his mouth.  But then, wonder of wonders, he closed it again and let Ray listen.

He planned to go out watching again the next night, but Canada chose that day to remember what clouds were all about.  They gathered all day long, stealthily at first, and then like it was fucking spring break weekend.  By sunset it had started to snow.  Really, really snow.  Really hard.

"It's just snow, Ray," Fraser said at dinner.  He was looking at Ray with sympathy, at the way Ray's head jerked up to stare at the ceiling every time he heard a board creak or the window jostle.  "I assure you, the house is perfectly sound."

"I know," Ray muttered.  It was just that the contrast was so severe.  Yesterday, the sky had been endless, and now everything was tightening in, Mother Nature closing up over them.  Anyway, Ray was used to brick and cement buildings; he wasn't sure he fully trusted wood.  He was distracted all night long, thinking about how they were getting sandwiched in between the snow and the ground, and he lost three games of chess in a row, which sucked, because he'd been on a lucky streak until then.

Fraser used to complain about the way the buildings in Chicago loomed up, blocking out the sky, but that was nothing compared to the sky falling in on top of them, just when Ray was getting used to having it up there where it was.

"What was that you were singing last night?" Fraser asked at breakfast.

"Huh?"  He didn't remember singing at all, but when Fraser hummed a few bars, Ray recognized the tune, and jumped in singing along with, "--I try to walk, but I run back to you; I hate myself for loving you."  Fraser gave him a bemused look as he served up hash browns and pancakes, and Ray shrugged it off, embarrassed.  "It's just a song.  It's cool."

"I'm sure it is.  I've just never heard you sing before."

"I only sing when I'm--"  _Scared._  Ray stuffed a fork full of pancake in his mouth, swallowed, and detoured into, "I kind of suck, as you noticed."

"I have to leave for a few days, Ray.  Would you like me to take you to Rankin Inlet?  You could stay in the hotel, or -- or, of course you could leave, now that the weather has taken a turn for the worse.  It won't thaw out, you know; it will only get colder from here."

Ray ate a little bit more, turning that over in his head.  "I don't mind staying."

"All right.  As soon as you eat and pack, I'll drive you--"

"Might as well stay here, you know?  Like you said, it's not gonna get any warmer, and I can't go running back to Rankin Inlet right and left."

Fraser sat down across the table, and then had to jump right up when the kettle on the stove started to whistle.  He moved the coffee from the burner, but instead of bringing it on over, he just stood there, staring at his wood stove with his back to Ray.  "You sound very...committed."

This was the part Ray must have thought over a thousand times, and shied away from talking to Fraser about an equal thousand times.  "Hey.  What's the point of vacationing in the frozen north if you're not gonna hang around long enough to enjoy the winter sports, you know?"

"Winter sports?"

"Ice fishing, hockey.  Whatever."

"Ray--"

He tried to keep his voice cool -- just the facts, ma'am.  "I want to stay the winter."

"_Ray._  You can't be-- you can't have thought this through.  The winters here--"

"Yeah, they're cold and they're dark, I picked that up.  I told you before, Fraser, I'm game to try anything once.  It'll be an adventure."

"Ray...."

"You said I could stay as long as I needed, right?  Well, I've been thinking.  You think I haven't, but I have been thinking.  And I need to get this right.  I need to know....  I need to see if I can get what you're doing here.  Already I--  This place is crazy, Fraser, you know?  It's ugly and it's--it's beautiful, and I can't look away from it, and if I leave now, I'll always wonder what it was that's doing this to me, and I--  Things have changed.  Ever since Vecchio fucking walked into my office, it seems like everything's changed, and I can't just go back.  I'm staying here, unless you're telling me that you won't let me."

The look on Fraser's face as he realized that he was stuck between agreeing to this and retracting his earlier invitation was priceless.  _Gotcha, you courteous son-of-a-bitch.  Go ahead, say you want me out of your house, I dare ya._

"Ray," he said, clearly trying to be reasonable about this.  When was he going to pick up on the fact that reason didn't always work on Ray?  For a smart guy, Fraser could be pretty slow.  "It takes...a certain kind of person to spend a whole winter this far north."

"A person like you, huh?"

"Well...."

"Don't think you know all my characteristics, Fraser."

"I _do_ know you, Ray.  I know you're stubborn, but I also know you're not a fool.  If you've given this as much thought as you say you have, then you'll see--"

"--things your way?  I'm not just being stubborn, here."

"You've considered everything?  Chinese food, Ray.  Pizza.  Your car.  Your family.  Cell phones.  Look around you, Ray, for God's sake!  Can you live like this?"

A week ago, Ray's answer to that question would have been a resounding _fuck that_.  But there was something about the sharp wind and the prospect of watching the sun rise and set in the space of three hours that felt more real all of a sudden, more intense, than takeout six nights a week and rush-hour traffic.  He could feel it, all the way down to the toes of his new boots: that he'd always done his best work when there was an occasion to rise to, and that this was something he'd been chasing, when all this time he'd thought he was just chasing his tail.

"I'll make you a deal," Ray said slowly.  "You go do your thing.  I'll spend a few days here; I'll just chill.  When you come back, if I've lost my mind and gone totally Shining, then I'll leave.  But if I still want to be here after being cooped up by myself, then end of discussion."

"As long as you give me your word that you'll be honest.  If you hate every minute of it, you won't say that you've been fine just to avoid admitting you were wrong."

"Done," Ray said, spitting in his palm and holding it out.  "Shake on it, Fraser, buddy."

"Really, Ray," he complained, but he did it.

Fraser hitched up his dogs, all but Diefenbaker.  "You don't have to leave the poor dog here babysitting," Ray said from the floor, where he was scratching Dief's chest.  "He's your partner, after all."

"Ray, even I wouldn't want to spend four days in this house totally alone."

"Four days?"  It sounded awfully real when Fraser put a number to it like that.

He looked up at the awkward not in Ray's voice.  It was nine in the morning, almost dawn, and Ray was holding the lantern so that Fraser could see the harness as he worked.  For once, there was something soft in Fraser's eyes; usually when Fraser got that worried look, it was all tangled up with skepticism, as if it was only a matter of waiting until Ray crashed and burned.  "You don't have to do this."

"Did you kiss me on the boat or not?"

"You were in dire need of oxygen--"

"Get outta here.  See you in four days."

"If you have any trouble -- if you need anything at all--"

"I'll steer toward the troll.  Chill.  Go on, hop to it, maintain the right.  Heh, you didn't think I knew that one, did you?"

Fraser shook his head, biting his lip on a little smile.  "Sometimes I underestimate you, Ray."

"Almost always.  Talk later, mush now, get the picture?"

"Understood."

 

**6.  "Is there anything on this ship that isn't bad luck?"**

Piece of cake.

There was solitaire, and he read one of Fraser's books (by a guy named Lord Dunsany, who was pretty cool for a Lord), and to his surprise, Diefenbaker was willing to play fetch in the snow.  Dief never did stuff like that in Chicago; maybe he got bored up here, too.  Ray even made a snowman.

Of course, that was all just on the first day.  That was the easiest.

The first night was a lot harder -- meaning after he ran out of things to do and went to bed, not after it got dark.  Ray couldn't sleep.  Knowing he had twelve more hours till dawn maybe had something to do with it.

On the second day he did a lot of singing, because there was no one around to notice that he kind of sucked.  He went from The Who to Madonna to The Eurythmics to Pearl Jam, and his Eddie Vedder impression did not suck, but of course Diefenbaker didn't appreciate its true brilliance.  Not that Fraser would've either, if he'd been around, so the whole thing was a wash.

He cleaned the stove and the windows on the third day, and by evening he was dangerously close to losing the bet.  Okay, a person could go _crazy_ like this.  A person could completely lose it.  It wasn't just the snow, or the darkness, or the lack of human voices other than your own.  It was the sudden smallness of your life, just the simple realization that your options were damn few and your world was down to something like a minimum-security prison cell even though you hadn't done anything wrong.

But at least there were the lights.  For the first time in forever, Ray really wanted to crack out some chalk and draw, but of course Fraser didn't have much in the way of art supplies.  He did have some charcoal pencils and paper -- nothing you could use to put down the play of the brilliant diversity in the sky, but he had the itch anyway now.  Ray drew the cabin, and the stove, and Dief, and it all pretty much sucked, too, but it was fun.  And, hell, he was out of practice.  At his best, during the first few years out of college, Ray was still no artist, but he'd turned out some work that sure didn't make your eyes bleed to look at it.  It just took a little getting back into the groove.

Fraser came back early in the morning on the fourth day -- really early, like middle-of-the-night early in the morning, not that most of the morning wasn't the night these days.  Ray was up, barely, but only because his sleep cycles had been thrown all to hell and his body kept wanting to sleep and wake up for no good reason.  He'd put water on the stove with oatmeal in mind, but the first words out of Fraser's mouth as he kicked the snow off his boots and came through the door was, "If you love me, Ray, you'll tell me that's coffee."

"Give me a minute and it will be.  I never used to realize you drank so much coffee before."

"Most Americans consume far too much caffeine.  It puts a strain on the thyroid gland and blunts the biological imperative to get an adequate amount of sleep.  I thought it best to set a good example for the other officers."

"You were trying to get cops to give up coffee?  That's what I like about you, Fraser -- the lost causes.  So, did you have fun?  Catch a lot of bad guys?"

Fraser was at his shoulder without warning, and Ray's head knew he was being crowded, and his Chicago-bred elbow was twitching to jab Fraser in the ribs, but another part of him was pathetically grateful for the sound of Fraser's breathing, the basic fact of him that changed the interior of a place that hadn't really changed in days.  "How are you?"

"Me?  Me, I'm groovy, Fraser.  Sleeping late, eating macaroni and cheese every day, I tell ya, this is the life.  Snow bum, that's me."

"Ray.  _Really_.  How are you?"

He turned to look at Fraser, and remembered again that they were the same height, even though Fraser always managed to seem tall in Ray's mind.  "I'm all right," he said, which was the simple truth.  "I can hack this."

After a moment, Fraser relaxed.  "Ray, you're the only man I know who comes to Kivalliq for a relaxing vacation."

"Don't try to second-guess me, Fraser.  I'm a crazy man.  There's no telling what I'll do next."

"I see that.  But if I might make a proposal, I think that what we should both do next is get out of the house.  Let me take you to Marble Island."

"Okay," Ray said, before even wondering where and what Marble Island was.  Like he really cared at that point; he'd mostly stopped listening around "get out of the house."

Even the word "island" didn't sink in until they were standing at the docks, when suddenly Ray realized that "island" equals "massive amount of water" equals "boat," and "Fraser" plus "boat" equaled a sum greater than or equal to the amount of trouble Ray had the energy to deal with after four days of no sunlight and a diet of macaroni and cheese.  "You want me to get on that thing?" Ray said, gesturing toward the ferry with both hands.  "With you?"

Fraser looked puzzled for a moment, and then smiled sheepishly.  "Oh...well.  Maybe you could just try to savour the irony."

"The _irony_, he says," Ray told Dief.  "All I want to know is, is he planning to kill me and lose the body at sea, or put the moves on me?"

"Ray!"

"Kill me."  Ray was morose about the subject, yet resigned.  "This is goodbye, cruel world time, here."

"Please just get on the boat, Ray."

Fraser knew the captain, of course.  He introduced Ray as Detective Kowalski, visiting from the United States.  "Did you know that I lived briefly in Chicago, Francis?"

Francis the Sea Captain spat his tobacco over the rail of the ship and pulled his cap lower over his eyes, so that the red knit edge of it was lying flat against the top of his bushy gray eyebrows.  "I surely did not know that, Constable Fraser.  That's hard to picture, if you'll pardon me for saying so."

"Not at all."  Fraser actually looked pleased about it.

"Don't worry," Ray chipped in, still stinging a little from that _lived briefly in Chicago_ crack.  "I was there, and it's hard for me to picture, too."  _Briefly_.  Huh.

And then he had to go and be patronizing, just because he caught Ray leaning way out over the rail once they were underway.  "Are you having trouble with your stomach, Ray?"

"On a slow boat like this?  You gotta be kidding me.  Can't a guy even go fish-watching anymore?"

Fraser put his elbows on the rail beside him, and for a dizzying second it was much too much like the way they'd been standing when it all came to an end.  "Are you finding any fish?"

"If wishes were fishes, we'd walk on the sea."  Ray's father used to say that to him.  A lot.  It took Ray years to figure out that it was a fancy way of saying _life sucks_.  "Hey, Fraser, whaddaya call a fish with no eyes?"

""Fssshhh."

"You've heard that one."  Damn, when even Fraser got the joke, you knew it was an old one.

"From Detective Huey, yes," he admitted with regret.

"Okay, well, what does g-h-o-t-i spell?"

"Ghosti."

"_Fish_, Fraser.  See, we were doing fish jokes?"

"Oh, were we?  Alive without breath, as cold as death, never thirsty, ever drink--"

"'_Ghosty_'?  That's not even a word, Fraser.  Where do you even get that from?"

"Didn't you want to hear my fish riddle, Ray?"

"I've heard it.  The answer's fucking _fish_."

"I don't think I understand yours."

"I don't think I understand _you_."

The one thing Ray _knew_ he didn't understand was what the fuck they were arguing about.  But it was too hard to shrug off when they were standing like this, shoulders almost touching and watching the water sucked underneath their boat, churning and falling.  _It's out of my hands_, he wanted to say, because Fraser deserved it.  He fucking deserved it, he deserved to have Ray give up on him, and Ray wanted just _once_ to be the one who called it quits and carried through.  The one who put the cat out and got on with his life.

It was impossible to miss Marble Island; it came into sight about an hour after the boat left Rankin Inlet, and it was, well, made of marble.  Or at least Ray guessed it was; it looked like an iceberg at first, and then he realized it was stone -- great walls of white, shimmering stone jutting out of the water, just like the crystal gardens that his dad bought Ray in the museum gift shop when he was a kid, rocks that grew like they were alive.  As they got closer, he realized that the glare of it didn't just come from the noon sunlight off of white rock; it really was part crystal, too.  And when they got even closer, he could see that the cliffs weren't as smooth as they looked from a distance, but pockmarked with little crevices all over, where white birds were nesting.  The whole thing looked like the Mount Olympus set for a Clash-of-the-Titans-type B-movie.

Only in a good way.

"I don't think I can go down there," he said when Fraser tried to get him to leave the boat.  "It looks like a place you'd go to die.  It's got a whole -- afterlife groove that I just can't get with.  It's too...."

"Beautiful?" Fraser suggested.  "Why do you have so little faith in life's simple pleasures, Ray?"

"If wishes were fishes, we'd walk on the sea...."

Fraser held out his hand, and what the hell was Ray supposed to do with that?  Hold it?  Sometimes he did _not_ know what was going through Fraser's head.  _Sometimes?  Huh._  "There's something I want to show you."

So of course Ray followed him.  They left the boat and started walking, with the seagulls (were there seagulls in the Arctic?  Or were these a whole different kind of noisy white fish-eating bird?) wheeling and wailing overhead, and the ground crunching underneath the soles of their boots, powdered rock and compacted dirt.

And when they got to the place that Fraser had promised to take him, Ray felt like a smart comment should get made about those homicidal tendencies of Fraser's, but his smart comments felt all used up, and he just kind of wished Fraser would hold out his hand again, because this time he might want to take it.  "Is this a cemetery?"  He whispered, out of knee-jerk respect for the dead, resting under bare ground with row after row of slightly misshapen white crosses lined up in the dirt.

"Yes," Fraser said simply.  He was looking upward and out, across the edges of the cliffs and the long spread of the cloudy green bay below them.

_Why would you bring me to a cemetery?_  Ray wanted to ask, but instead he said, "This isn't Es-- Inuit.  These are crosses.  I mean, these were--"

"This was the crew, two hundred strong, of a Hudson Bay Company ship that went aground on Marble Island in 1719.  The whereabouts of Governor James Knight and his men were unknown for over half a century."

"If they wrecked, then who buried--"

"Oh, they didn't die in the shipwreck, Ray," Fraser said, as if mildly surprised that Ray (of all people) could think that sinking ships killed people.  "They washed up on this island, where they lived for two years.  They received aid from the Inuit locals, but ultimately they were not up to the challenges of the environment."

"They froze?"

"They starved."

Ray punched him in the shoulder -- not too hard, because his memory of what had followed his first hard slugging of Fraser was still keen.  "If you brought me here to make some kind of point, just fucking say it.  You don't think I have what it takes, you don't think I can survive up here even if I'm just sponging off of you.  You _never_ thought I could get fuck-all done without you doing all the real work for me, and now--"

"Ray."  Fraser looked both confused and abashed by his outburst.  "You can't have grasped my point yet--"

"What, now I'm stupid, too?  Stupider than usual?"

"_Ray_.  Because I haven't _made_ it yet.  I'm not finished with the story."  Fraser waited a minute, and then seemed to take Ray's continuing silence as permission to continue.  "During the two years that Governor Knight and his men lived on Marble Island, they spent very little time learning how to meet their needs in an unfamiliar environment.  Do you know what they did with their time?"

"_Iron Chef_ re-runs?"

"They built a ship.  They continued work on their new ship, Ray, until the last man was too sick and malnourished to carry on."  After a pause, Fraser added, "Now you may feel free to criticize my story or my motives for telling it, as you prefer."

And he would have, happily, free of guilt, if he'd known what the hell Fraser was talking about.  "Okay," he admitted at last.  "Ballpark it for me: what's the message?"

"That the human heart longs for its home so fiercely that a man will die before he gives up the dream of returning there."

For a minute, Ray was tempted to understand.  He thought about Chicago, its noise and its graffiti, the burned-grease smell of the best hot dog carts, and gargoyles on the buildings, and amusement parks, and the Imax at the Museum of Science and Industry, and the old men who sat on their apartment balconies and swore across at each other in a fluid mixture of English and Polish, just like Ray's own grandfather used to swear at the neighbors.

But no.  No _way_.  Fraser thought he knew Ray so well, knew what he was capable of and where he would always fall down.  "I'm not dying, Fraser.  Like I'd let you off the hook that easy."

He cocked his head, honestly surprised.  "You?  What--  Oh, no, Ray.  No, no.  I was speaking from my own experience."

And then he got it, and shit, he'd had it _backwards_ before.  It was Ray who was the native guide, and Fraser the shipwrecked Brit just trying to get from here to there, and Fraser had lived -- _briefly_ \-- in Chicago, getting some kind of scurvy of the spirit, until his ship came in and his fish flew the coop, and this was an apology, or at least an explanation, or at least Fraser trying to tell him...

...that it wasn't Ray's fault.

"You kissed me," Ray said.

"Not intentionally, Ray."

One small step for Fraser, one giant leap for diplomatic relations.  "Can we get out of here, Fraser?  This place gives me the willies.  It's...ghosty."

"It's _what_?"

"You know, ghosty.  Don't look at me, you're the one who made it up."

"Ah, you mean, '_ghosti_,' Ray.  G-h-o-s-t-i."

"Yeah, 'fish' doesn't have an 's' in it."

"I still don't understand how--"

"Look, it's _g-h_ like in 'enough,' _t-i_ like in 'locomotion,' and _o_ like in -- like in -- well, Christ, I forget now where the _o_ sounds like an _ih_.  You got me forgetting my own joke now, Fraser, thanks a lot.  But ha ha, that was it, fish, get it?"

"I believe I do.  I thought perhaps that you were referring to 'ghosti,' the proto-Indo-European root word from which our modern words 'guest' and 'host' are both descended."

"You thought perhaps I was, huh?"

Fraser shrugged, or maybe just pulled his coat closer against the wind.  "Briefly."

"You know what I think?  I think _perhaps_ was the only word I understood out of that sentence."

"Well...."  Fraser cast a sideways look at him, as if giving Ray a chance to say _Fraser, shut up_ or _not that I even wanna_ _know_.  When he didn't say those things, Fraser went on.  "Nearly all of our modern European languages -- with a handful of exceptions, Finnish, Estonian, Basque of course--"

"Of course Basque."

"--show signs of being closely related linguistically, implying that they were at one point in time the same language.  Scholars have reconstructed that parent language, at least in part, and it is commonly referred to as proto-Indo-European, the native tongue of the nomads who originated most likely in the Caucasus Mountains and proceeded to conquer most of ancient Europe."

"Wait a minute, wait a minute.  Now, I'm not gonna yank your chain and tell you that I'm following this, but it sounds like you're telling me that this isn't even a real language we're talking about, here."

"Well, proto-Indo-European was probably never spoken in exactly the form--"

"So someone made it up.  Like Klingon."

"Nobody _made it up_, Ray.  It's a hypothetical parent-language--"

"Imaginary."

"_Hypothetical_."

"Imaginary."

"Theoretical."

"Imaginary."

"Leaving this _aside_ for the moment, the point is that one of the cultural commonalities among Indo-European societies is the pre-eminence placed on the guest-host bond of mutual obligation, a typical feature of nomadic cultures across the world.  Based on similarities among related words in many languages, 'ghosti' is the commonly accepted proto-Indo-European root word for hospitality."

"Basically, 'ghosti' is the reason that upstanding Canadians don't tell you to come stay with them and then kick your ass out, right?" Ray clarified with a grin.

"Basically," Fraser replied, with a hint of one.

"Okay.  So how do you say '_love_' in your proto-hypothetical reconstructive-surgery language?"

Fraser's head swiveled sharply toward him, but Ray was looking up at the sky and couldn't make out his exact expression.  "I...I don't know.  Offhand."

"You sure pick some interesting words to know and not know.  Offhand."

"I know 'sun.'  And 'earth.'"

"I bet you do.  Hey, Fraser -- say 'vernacular' for me, wouldja?"

"Vernacular?"

"Thanks," Ray said placidly, and for once even Fraser knew when to give up trying to figure things out.

 

**7.  "Would you make a leap like that if you didn't have to?"**

"And these are _your_ messages, Mr. Kowalski."

"Huh?"  Ray was busy trying to chew through a loose piece of yarn coming out of the thumb of his glove; he raised his eyes but not his head to look at Shaughnessy.  "Since when do I get messages here?  I don't even work here."

Either because he didn't feel like answering that or because he couldn't understand Ray when he had his glove stuck in his mouth, Shaughnessy said, "She certainly does sound like a lovely lady, Mr. Kowalski.  I must say I don't understand why you don't seem to miss her they way she seems to miss you."

"_What?_" Ray said, at the same time even Fraser looked up from his typewriter and said, "Pardon me?"

Shaughnessy looked back and forth between them, caught off-guard.  "Your--your wife.  She left seven messages--"

"My _ex_-wife," Ray said, snatching the neat little stack of While You Were Out pages from the Mountie's hand.  "She's my ex-wife."

"You can use the telephone in my office for privacy," Shaughnessy offered.

Foolishly, Ray found himself looking to Fraser for his next cue.  Fraser seemed to understand, which was kinda sad, because Ray didn't.  Anyway, he gave Ray an encouraging nod and said, "You have time.  Why don't you go ahead?"

"I don't wanna -- well, because of the time difference--"

"We're on Central Standard Time, Ray.  Just like Chicago."

"Right.  Right you are."  As always, that bastard.

The phone in Shaughnessy's office was one of those clunky black kinds that Ray's folks used to have in the mid-sixties.  Ray had always thought it was immoral to sit at another man's desk, so he sat down on the floor with his back to its wooden side, sitting the phone between his feet and bracing the receiver between his ear and shoulder as he dialed.

"Hello?" Stella said in that suspicious voice that she always used when she didn't recognize the number on caller ID.  Stella had a phobia about telemarketers.

"Stella.  It's me."

"Oh my God, Ray.  Oh my _God_."  She almost sounded like she was about to cry.  "_Where_ are you?  Do you know what day it is?"

It was a weird question, but what the hell.  "Um, no, not actually."  He definitely knew it wasn't their anniversary, which was in August, and anyway he shouldn't have to remember that anymore, should he?

"It's the first of December, Ray.  You've been gone since _September ninth_!  Two months, Jesus Christ, I was worried-- we've been worried sick about you, absolutely sick.  _Everybody_ has.  What in the fuck happened to you, Ray?"

Ray vaguely remembered that in the first couple of years they were married, he even thought it was cute when her voice got all shrill like that.  It wore off.  "You know I'm with Fraser.  It's not like he wouldn't have passed the message along if I got eaten by a musk-ox or something."

"_Musk-ox?_  Are you out of your mind?  Are you seriously _sick_, Ray?"

"It was just a little joke.  Musk-oxes don't eat meat.  Polar bears, that's what eat you.  And maybe walruses, I'm not sure about that."

"Ray, listen to me.  You have to come home.  It might not be too late to get your job back--"

"My job," Ray repeated fuzzily.  Funny how he'd _known_ there would be no job to go back to, and even so he'd found a way to never stop and think about it.

"Your _job_.  You've gone way past personal leave and sick days; you've lost it all, Ray.  I'm paying to store your things since you got served with an eviction notice, I'm lying to your mother because how the hell am I supposed to tell her that you haven't been in contact with anyone since you left the country two _months_ ago, I'm feeding your fucking turtle!  I'm -- I'm--"

"Stel, are you crying?"

"No!  Where _are_ you, Ray?  Where are you?"

And because obviously she knew that, since she'd been calling Rankin Inlet for two weeks now, Ray tried to answer the real question as best he understood it.  "There are these ice fields up here, with rivers running through them.  Real moving water, cutting through the ice.  You wouldn't think it could happen that way, but it does.  Sometimes you see what looks like giant worm-tunnels, miles and miles long, squirming all over the ground.  Those are sand eskers, they've got something to do with old glaciers.  Wolves build dens inside them, and caribou use them like hiking trails; they just line up and parade along the tops of the eskers.  In the summer, Fraser says they have to do it that way to stay up high where the winds are so strong they keep off the insects."

"Ray--"

"A herd of caribou -- Stel, it's not like you think it is. We're not talking about a hundred caribou, or even five hundred.  I saw a herd walking the eskers, and I swear to God, I never saw that many animals in my whole life.  Fraser said there were probably twenty thousand of them.  _Twenty thousand_.  Caribou.  That's ten for every single person living in Rankin Inlet."

"_Ray_\--"

"I've heard Inuit throat-singers.  I had dinner with a paleontologist who found alligator bones up here; did you know this place used to have the same climate as the Florida Everglades have now?  We're talking forty million years ago, literally forty _million_ years.  I'm thinking about entering a dogsled race in March.  I stood in the exact center of Canada, this spot west of Baker Lake, and there's not even a sign on the place.  The colder it gets, the easier it is to walk in snowshoes, because the snow stops being slippery and gets packed down hard; it's a piece of cake compared to driving in the snow back home."

"You're never coming back, are you?"

Her voice sounded so frail and young.  For a minute, Ray flashed on a little girl, the Gold Coast damsel in distress with her wide eyes carefully tracking the waving barrel of a gun.  "Don't be crazy," he said kindly.  "I am coming back.  Eventually.  And I'll pay you back for the storage, too."

"I don't care about the storage.  And _you_ don't care about caribou herds."

"When did everyone else start knowing me so freaking well?  There were twenty thousand of them!  It looked like the goddamn Macy's parade; it was cool."

"Ray, I want you to listen to me, and I want you to focus."  He couldn't help smiling; he  remembered how it used to make his knees go weak when she lawyer-talked him like that.  "I'm only going to say this once, whether you're on the next plane home or you spend the rest of your life being raised by kindly walruses."

"I'm focusing.  I'm with ya."

"I love you.  I was raised to be a lady and never get angry and always do the civilized thing, and all my life, I've felt like there was a whole part of the world that I didn't know any better than the dark side of the moon.  When I met you, it was like being handed the key.  You have such feeling, Ray.  You taught me how to fight and play and how to feel what was good for me instead of how to decide what was best for me, and I think about you every day, if only because I have to try to give myself those things now, instead of letting you do all our living for both of us.  If it hadn't been for you, Ray, I'd probably be dead by now, or at least something that wasn't completely human.  My life would make so much sense, and I'd know so little about happiness."

"Life's simple pleasures?" he said weakly.  All this praise from Stella was enough to knock a guy right off his rocker; he literally didn't know what to do with all that.

"No, Ray.  _Nothing_ is simple with you, and that's what makes you so amazing.  Life doesn't have to be about endless chores and simple pleasures.  It can be -- with you, it was -- vast.  And wonderful."

Funny how he understood that she wasn't taking him back; there wasn't even a hot second of hope there, or of misery, either.  Maybe somewhere in there, Stella had taught him how to decide what was best instead of always just feeling what was good.  Maybe that was the point of love, to swap virtues, like making mix tapes of your record collection for someone who had all different music.  "You _are_ crying.  Stella, what's wrong?"

"There's nothing up there, Ray!  I keep thinking about twenty-four-hour nights and snow and icebergs and fucking musk-oxen, and I hate it, I hate thinking of you there.  You should be here.  You should be driving your car and holding forth on the right way to wrap mu-shu pork and getting up in the middle of dinner because a drug dealer just paged you and you have to go to the sixth circle of Hell and chat with him.  You should be _living_, Ray.  How can you be _you_ up there?"

Ray had never spent any time wondering when he was and was not him.  That definitely sounded like a Stella thing.  "I want you to have the car, Stel.  Somebody should be driving it, and-- aw, hell.  You loved it as much as anyone, back in the day."

She laughed raggedly.  "It's a great car."

"We had some fun, didn't we?  Take the car.  Break some traffic laws; it's good for ya."

"It would help if you would just tell me something I could understand.  Why would you leave everything you ever loved and not even be able to tell anyone when you're coming back?  I don't understand about the throat-singers and the sand eskers; I'm sorry, Ray, I just don't.  And I've known you for so long -- can't you say something that sounds like you?"

Something that sounded like him.  A random mental image flashed in front of Ray, a hick general store on a dirt road, surrounded by trees and grass, with a sign tacked over the door that said Gone Fishing.  "Fraser's all alone up here.  He says he likes it, but I think maybe he's just nuts.  I can't leave him, babe.  He's my partner."

"Now, that," she said softly, after a pause long enough to make Ray notice that the crackling phone connection sounded just like the noise the Northern Lights made, "makes sense to me.  Oh, Ray.  _God_, Ray, you never make it easy on yourself, do you?"

"Hey, the more outta my league they are, the bigger the payoff."  It was cool how Stella didn't get all technical and tell him how Fraser wasn't his partner anymore, Fraser had left him and anyway Ray wasn't even a cop anymore-- _Jesus_, he'd lost his _job_; that one was going to be sinking in by degrees for a long time to come.

But then, who else would get what Ray meant when he said that?  In the years he'd spent with the force, Ray had been assigned something like six or eight partners before Fraser, and after a few months or a few years there was always a parting of the ways, retirement or promotion or career change.   The department would get the back room of some pool hall and throw a goodbye party, and everybody but Ray would drink too much and do the I-love-you-man thing and break stuff, and Ray would sort of appreciate the tradition, but he didn't like to drink except alone and he knew Stella hated department parties, so they'd always leave early.  They'd walk home, hand-in-hand, and Stella would give him those worried looks out of the corner of her eyes until she finally said, "Are you all right, Ray?"  Then he'd  throw his arm around her and bundle her roughly close to his side until she squeaked in half-protest at the indignity, and he would say, "Are you nuts?  I already got a partner, kiddo.  I got all the partner I can handle."

She was the last person who was going to pretend not to understand what it meant.  Eighteen years, she was his constant, his inuksuk.  Eighteen years, honey to his flies and air to his water, and nobody but the two of them had been around for so long or had done so much to teach each other what it meant to grow up, the good and the bad of it.  "Be careful," she said sadly, as if well aware that he hadn't been and wouldn't be.

"Be happy."

It was the best advice they'd ever given each other; Ray had the weird, tingling sense that they'd been together for eighteen years just so they'd be able to say those four words in a way that the other could hear.

He sure as hell hoped Stella was better at following directions than he was.

 

**8.  "Well, as you know, Ray, any situation can deteriorate."**

Ray made one last trip into the Inlet a couple of days before Christmas to check the mail, and lo and behold, his present for Fraser was actually there at the station waiting.  He was in such a good mood that he ran by the Northern to pick up some more oranges; Christmas _meant_ hot spiced cider to a true Kowalski man, and the only years there hadn't been any simmering on the stove by Christmas Eve were the two right during and after his divorce, when he'd been too depressed to give a fuck.  He'd been tinkering with his recipe most of the week, and definitely it needed more orange rinds.

Polly, the manager's wife, was stocking in the back of the store, and when she heard him come in she waved vigorously and called out his name -- or at least the butchered corpse of his name that most of the Inuit in Rankin Inlet called him, a big, sloppy stew of Ks and Ls and Ws.  "Hey, Polly!" he called back.

"You and the Constable are going to be in church tomorrow, right?"

"Uh...y'know, I have no clue.  Yes?  Maybe?  I'll ask him when I get home."

"Of course you are.  And before that, you're coming to our house for the party.  Now, it's just a small thing; the real party is on Christmas Day.  I heard you were training a team for the 200?"

"Aw, I dunno.  I'm just playing around with it.  Dief's too old and I'm too dumb to win anything, but I thought it could be a little bit of fun.  It's up in the air."

"Well, there's gonna be some racing, so you can try yourself out and see where you are.  And of course we need the Constable for caroling, and I've got money on you in the duck-plucking contest."

"On _me_?"

"Long-shot," she said, waggling her eyebrows.  "Great odds.  Big payoff, Killwiwlski."

"Well, that's the clincher, then.  Polly, you know how long it's been since anyone invited me to a good duck-plucking?"

"Merry Christmas!"

"Merry Christmas, Polly; we'll catch you."

Ray was in such a good mood, with the new coat he ordered for Fraser in one hand and the bag of freshly imported American oranges in the other, that he didn't even curse too much when the snowmobile stalled out, and not even just because it was hard to curse with the flashlight stuck between his teeth as he poked around inside it.

He got it running again, just as he was beginning to think ahead toward the two-mile walk back home.  "Jackpot," he crowed to nobody at all, spitting out his flashlight. "_Big_ payoff, Killwiwlski."  He was man!  He provided warm furs, fixed engines, and plucked ducks!  He was a legend in his own time, _yeah_, baby.

That was the kind of mood he was in when he got home, but one look from Fraser killed it dead.  "Dammit, Ray," Fraser said, and Ray froze in his tracks.  Since when did Fraser say shit like that?  "Where have you been?"

"I told you, I had to run an errand to the Inlet."

"That was _hours_ ago.  It's pitch black and ten degrees below zero outside -- _Farenheit_."

"Okay, cut the little pill in half every morning, Fraser.  I had some trouble with the snowmobile.  I fixed it.  Quick -- don't praise my ingenuity and resourcefulness."  Fraser just sat there, so either he didn't get the joke or he didn't take it like a joke.  Because the silence was creeping him out, Ray kept talking.  "Yeah, it's dark and cold -- shocker!  Man, I bought some oranges, but what you need is fresh-squeezed Prozac."

"You and I need to talk, Ray."

That sounded bad.  Very bad.  "How about you talk while I play in the cider."

"Ray, this is  serious.  I need your undivided attention."

"Yeah, like _that's_ ever going to happen," Ray muttered, wielding a butcher knife a little too aggressively.  The first orange fell in half and splattered him with sticky juice.

"I want you to go home, Ray."

He dropped the heavy knife, and it hit the iron stove with a terrific noise.  "Well...fuck you," Ray said, more perplexed than angry.  "I'm not ready to go yet."

"Did you hear what I said, Ray?  I--"

"Huh-uh, no, because before you said I could stay as long as I needed to, and I need to, and--and no take-backs, Fraser.  Where's your frigging ghosti?"

"This is not a game.  People die outside in weather like this."

"You're _worried_ about me?  You want me to leave for my own good, is that it?"  Fraser nodded once, stiffly.  "Oh, fuck you, Fraser!  No way, _no_.  I'm not going."

Fraser stood up from his chair; Ray wondered for a second why he as in uniform, then figured it was like having moral support from the Queen or something.  "I'm asking you to leave."

Ray shrugged jerkily.  "Well, I'm not leaving, so it sucks to be you."  Bastard.  Bastard, how could you spring this on a buddy at _Christmas_, for fuck's sake?

"Ray, the American writer and diplomat Benjamin Franklin--"

"Fuck me with a herd of caribou, Fraser, I fucking _know_ who Benjamin Franklin is!"

"--once said that visitors, like fish, begin to stink after three days."

"I'm not a fish, I'm a sign."

"What?"

Pressing the momentary advantage of not being the most confused guy in the room, Ray advanced on Fraser, only just slightly sane enough to be brandishing the metal ladle he'd been using in the cider instead of the knife.  "I'm a _sign_, I'm something you've got to get through that Man of Solid Steel head of yours, I've got a fucking motive for this fucking story."

"Which would be...?"

"Which would be that if you're not careful, there's not going to be anyone here to bury you after you finally succeed in freezing yourself to death."

"I've lived on the tundra all my life, Ray -- at higher latitudes than this, even.  My chances of dying from exposure, while not non-existent, are--"

"Inside, Fraser, Jesus.  I'm talking about inside.  I do know what a metaphor is, too."  Ray hooked the ladle over Fraser's shoulder and laid his other hand flat against the serge of his red uniform, over his chest.  "You don't think I know how nuts I make you?  Come on, Fraser.  I bitch, I complain, I act snotty when you're right about something and I never let you forget it when you're wrong.  I pick fights, I call your stories stupid, and I don't even have the common decency to hold a decent grudge.  I act like I'm just as good as you, even though you know damn well that compared to you, I'm dumb, clumsy, and sloppy.  I need you to save my life, and I always find a way to blame you for the way you do it.  I make you _crazy_.  You didn't leave Chicago because you missed Canada; you left because you really, really liked socking me one in the jaw and it freaked you out."

"I never expected you to be perfect."

"Come on!  Just say it, just say, 'Ray, my friend, I could not live with you another single second because you're always sticking a wrench in my system and you never apologize even when you know you should and then you go and tell me that I should live my life more like you do, and that's the absolute last thing I want.'"

"I'm not going to say that."

"Well, I sure don't know why not, because it's true, isn't it?"  Fraser said nothing.  "You. Kissed. Me.  _Dammit_, Fraser, you kissed me."

"I never will again," he promised, cold and blazing at the same time.  "I want you out of my house.  I want you to go; I can't take this any longer."

"I know, this human contact, it's crazy, isn't it?  But trust me, Fraser, it's the latest rage; all the kids are doing it."  He had Fraser backed all the way to the wall now, where he stood like he was chained to it.  "I'm not saying I got all the answers, Fraser, Christ knows I don't.  I don't even know what I want to do with the rest of my life, except that suddenly it seems like there's more to life than getting shot at, and maybe you were right about the caffeine because I sleep a lot better now, and maybe it was a mistake to build that ship and maybe it wasn't, but those men didn't die because they were homesick, they died because we all have to kick it someday, and the only way I know how to be is loyal, the only thing I know is that you get over people when you want to, and I don't want to.  I don't want to."

He was all out of breath, which was no big deal because of the way that Fraser had excess lung capacity, and the way he breathed hot and sort of honey-flavored across Ray's tongue, kissing Ray like it was his last chance on this earth to figure out what kissing was for, anyway.  "You have to go," Fraser was whispering against his bottom lip, the fingers of one hand smoothing back and forth over half an inch of hair at Ray's temple.  "Nothing ever goes according to plan when you're involved.  I can't be expected to live this way indefinitely."

Fraser sounded so sad as he said it that Ray was tempted to feel sorry for him.  But on the other hand -- _what?_  Feel _sorry_ for Fraser because he was such a control freak that feeling good when he hadn't ordered good from room service felt like the collapse of western civilization?  Fraser just needed some goddamn perspective, or a good belt in the face, or to get laid, or -- if Santa Claus liked Ray this year -- maybe all three.

"Sorry," he said tightly, "I didn't know you had a _plan_.  If there's a _plan_, then that's different.  Why didn't you say you had a plan?  Lemme guess, on the count of three, I shut the fuck up and disappear, huh?  Just like the real Ray Vecchio."

"Stop.  Please."

"Is that how you like it, huh, Fraser?  A little tiny bit of feeling something real every few years, like getting a tetanus shot, and then you're vaccinated against the human race for a little while longer?  Easy come, easy go -- it was nice knowing you, but not _too_ nice, God forbid.  Hey, if I can figure out a way not to leave any fingerprints behind when I go, can I be the goddamn love of your life, too?"

"Fuck you, Ray."  It was a little weak and shaky, but for a first effort?  Not bad.  Convincing.  Even the way Fraser kissed him didn't totally undercut the basic sense of outraged injustice, even though Fraser kissed in a desperate burst of heat and color, like the midwinter displays the sun made at noon, sunrise and sunset all crunched together in their one big chance.

And even though Ray's mother's days of not being in that grave of hers would be seriously numbered if she knew about any of this, she was the one who taught him never to pass up an advantage, and Ray didn't think he'd ever put that advice to better use than this.  Finding his way through Fraser's layers of whatchacallit pants and long underwear was like driving in Chicago; Ray seemed to know how to do it if he didn't have to stop and think it through, and even though he couldn't see what the hell he was doing, his hand had pretty well aced Basic Male Anatomy 101, even if he'd had to repeat the course quite a few time over the last twenty years.  It might have been weird to be feeling a dick in his hand, except not at the same time that he was feeling a hand on his dick, except that all of that was totally swept under by the weirdness of Fraser's flush and his hushed breath coming out in steadily quickening beats from between his wet, parted lips.  And then there were Fraser's eyes, wide with amazement, as blue as drowning, and Ray breathed back into him at the mouth, and for the first time he knew that he'd never been crazy -- not about this, because some things were better off smashed and sometimes the dealer offered you another card and whether or not you took it determined whether or not you were still in the game at all.

It never ceased to amaze Ray, what Fraser would lick up.  But just this once, he didn't bring up what a freakish habit it was; Ray was too busy watching his hand tremble as Fraser's tongue passed back and forth over every inch of it.  Exerting most of his remaining strength of will, Ray turned his hand over slightly, brushing Fraser's lips with his fingers.  "Would...um...."

Fraser nodded, because of course Fraser understood.  He was smart like that, and maybe he was a little bit right about how Ray should say so more often, just sometimes for no reason up and say, "Fraser, my friend, I do admire you, because you work so hard to do right by everybody, and I think we'd all be like you if we could hack it, but I for one can't, and you blow my mind, blow it right out of the water most of the time."

For the first time in almost four months, so far as Ray knew, Fraser got to lie down on his own bed instead of on a bunch of thermal blankets on the floor.  Better yet -- as far as Ray was concerned -- he got to lie down on top of Ray -- and down, and down, and down, speaking of blowing Ray's mind.  It occurred to Ray to wonder if this oral fixation of Fraser's was something he learned among the Mounties or the Inuit, but as soon as he thought about asking, he had auditory hallucinations of some story about chewing whale fat and suddenly he was done with that whole train of thought, and shortly after that he was done with most others.

"You already are, Ray," he whispered against the skin of Ray's stomach, where his sweater was rucked up, and both shirts underneath it, too.  Fraser's mouth left a wet stain where it stopped against Ray's body to speak, and Ray could already feel the rising tide of restlessness inside himself, rumbling _more_ and _this time, let's try...._  It would take his body a little longer to catch up, but Christ, given how long it had been since Ray got any, we were probably counting minutes and not hours here.

"Already, what am I?"

"The love of my life."

"Wow, that's a really _great _reason to kick somebody out of the house.  Fraser, you need to go back to the States for a little while.  You Canadians just fuck up this whole divorce business when you try it."

"Actually, Ray, the statistics on divorce--"

"Actually, Fraser, it was just a lame joke, and you should feel free to shut up any time now."

Fraser kissed him again, a little lower on his hip this time.  "I planned to spend the rest of my life here, you know."

"I figured."

"I can't ask you to do that.  You would never be...."

Habit made him want to say, _Shut up, Fraser, don't tell me what I would and wouldn't be_.  But this was the wrong time for adrenaline-buzzed bravado, and even Ray could see that.  "I'm sort of liking this business of not knowing where I'm going to be in ten years.  I dunno, Fraser, I just--I just feel like I'm doing something right.  Okay, maybe more than one something.  All I want to do is pluck a Christmas duck at Polly Tiimu's party tomorrow night, and maybe get you to teach me how you just did that thing with your  throat.  That's _gotta_ be an Inuit thing.  Anyway, can't we just...you know, be here for an hour or two before you start worrying about our future?"

"I appreciate that sentiment, Ray.  I really do.  I just...don't know how it would affect me.  Failing with you for the second time."

Ray ran his fingers through Fraser's hair.  "Okay, you know what?  _Don't_ give me some kind of lame two-different-worlds speech.  Gah.  You're the guy who understands how particle beams from the frigging sun -- which you can say in English, French, Inuktitut, _and_ proto-Indo-European -- can be so attracted to the North Pole that these solar wind things keep right on managing to get all the way to Nunavut.  How does that make sense to you, but this doesn't?"

"And it makes sense to you?"  Fraser shifted around slightly, looping his arms around Ray's waist.

"Ben, nine-tenths of the shit that comes out of your mouth makes no sense to me.  I'm just the guy who can fix your snowmobile."

"Much more than just that, Ray," Fraser assured him earnestly.  Ray rolled his eyes.  "You're the man who can hear what colours sound like from a hundred kilometres away."

One more thing that Ray didn't understand, one more crazy, where-the-fuck-did-that-come-from thing like all the others that life was made up of.  But as things Fraser said that Ray didn't even pretend to understand went, that was definitely one of his favorites.


End file.
